Elon Musk mocks Meta as Facebook, Instagram hit by global outage
Facebook was hit by major outages as US voters took part in Super Tuesday — and Elon Musk didn’t miss his chance to stick the boot in.
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Service has been restored to major social media sites run by Meta after at least half a million users were hit by an outage.
Meta-owned Facebook, Messenger and Instagram were stung by outages overnight, with many users complaining they were kicked off the platforms and unable to log back in.
A Meta spokesman said: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”
The outage spanned different parts of the world, with the United States heavily impacted.
As of this 5.45am this morning in Australia, it appeared the apps were working as normal.
The outages also appeared to be affecting other major social media apps, including TikTok, Snapchat and Google’s YouTube video platform.
The outages — reported across Europe, Australia and Asia as well as the US — began around 2am (AEDT) and were still unresolved about an hour later.
“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote, somewhat ironically, on X (formerly Twitter).
Elon Musk, who bought X for $68 billion in 2022, didn’t miss the opportunity to stick the boot into his rival.
“If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” he quipped.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
Many of the outages were reported in the United States, where voters were taking part in one of the biggest days on the political calendar: Super Tuesday, a date where several US states hold primary elections.
According to website Downdetector, there were more than 566,700 reports of Facebook outages.
Of those, 75 per cent of the reported problems had to do with the login.
The site also reported more than 85,000 users encountered problems with Instagram.
Frustrated social media users took to the X platform, where the hashtag #facebookdown was trending.
- with the New York Post
Originally published as Elon Musk mocks Meta as Facebook, Instagram hit by global outage
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